Savage Journey to the American Dream

Maybach;
2012

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Rick Ross has a fascinating habit of signing rappers with infinitely less charisma and presence than himself. How else to explain his attraction to workhorses like Stalley? The talented but decidedly dazzle-averse Ohio rapper traffics in straight-ahead sincerity, rapping entirely in pained, vague clichés about making it through struggles, staying free of temptation, and striving for success. He has built up a dedicated fanbase with the same kind of dauntless diligence required to run for city alderman, and displays an equal level of magnetism. Ross collects these guys: Wale, Pill, now Stalley. He reupholstered Wale into a strip-club rapper and dropped Pill. What he's going to do with Stalley remains to be seen, but if this lushly appointed new mixtape is any indication, Stalley's having his moment in the boss' favor.

Stalley's alliance with Ross makes for an interestingly muddled listening experience. Stalley has cut himself out as struggling everyman, but here he's rapping on behalf of an imprint named for a high-end car line so prohibitively expensive that it actually went out of business because so few could afford it. He tries to justify this dissonance on a song called, of all things, "Island Hopping": "I was underground then, still underground now/ Difference is I'm under palm trees, not trying to be found," he insists. Besides the fact that the line is nonsensical, it falls prey to what I call rap's "Stillmatic Rule": the minute a rapper has to claim they're "still" something, they're obviously no longer that thing.

The production is where Stalley's Intelligent Bass Music most clearly meets up with his boss' Maybach Music. He has always relied on beats to do all the melodramatic work his small, boyish voice can't do, and here, he leans heavily on the work of the Huntsville duo Block Beattaz, who have spent years draping the humble, blue-collar sentiments of G-Side in 6,000 astral planes of glimmering synths. They provide the same sonic transformation here, deploying an arsenal of rippling harps and orchestral presets to lend weight to Stalley's abstracted musings. Their "Petrin Hill Peonies" starts with a straight chop of a gritty soul song by Charles Bradley, a James Brown impersonator-turned-belter signed to Daptone, before they smear the vibe with low, pummeling drums that move the track to woozier, druggier places. "Route 21" outfits Stalley in a sumptuous orchestral reimagining of Jay-Z's "Imaginary Player". Stalley picks judiciously from other producers, too: "Everything New" invites Chad Hugo, aka The Half of the Neptunes You Forgot Existed, to remind us of his brain-puncturing way with a Korg. As a collection of beats, this mixtape is impeccable.

As a rapper, however, Stalley is a pretty reliable momentum-douser. He likes to dangle his rhymes just over the bar lines, like he's got one lazy leg draped over the track, but his voice carries the strained urgency of a baby Freeway. Pair this with his tendency to willfully mix up his gangsta-rap stock imagery (women are gold diggers, he will shoot you if pushed) with conscious-rap boilerplate (like Big K.R.I.T., Stalley's songs are full of nameless supporters thanking him for saving hip-hop, begging him not to lose his soul in the Big Old World), and you have one confused non-persona. His best moments are small, plainspoken observations that sound like they come from a singular, careful mind: "I keep my circle small, so I'm hard to leech from," he tells us on "Hammers and Vogues". Occasionally he roams across a nice image, but he has a distressing tendency to rattle off entire 32-bar verses without once pricking up your ears. Savage Journey ends with the song off of Rick Ross' Rich Forever mixtape that featured Stalley prominently, the left-field electro-rap jam "Party Heart", produced by Chuck Ingrish. It's one of this tape's more arresting moments, but on Rich Forever, it stopped the momentum dead. The contrast is telling.